Back in May, Futuremark announced their next-generation graphics card benchmark aimed at testing the limits of computers' DirectX 11 performance. With this announcement, they had released a short tech demo to give a taste of what was to come. Unfortunately, since then things have been relatively quiet, with only the occasional report of the benchmark release being delayed.

Now, Futuremark has broken that silence with the release of yet another tech demo trailer video, as well as the reaffirmation of their promise to release the tool by the end of the year.

"The High Temple tech demo showcases the amazing real-time graphics that are possible today using readily available DirectX 11 hardware," said Jukka Mäkinen, Futuremark CEO, "With 3DMark 11 releasing later this year and an ever increasing number of games using DirectX 11 there is a lot to look forward to for PC gamers."

3DMark11 uses a native DirectX 11 designed by Futuremark to test some of the exciting new features of the tool set including tesselation, compute shaders, and multithreading, as well as the usual standbys like volumetric lighting and depth of field processing.

Currently there is no word on a concrete release timeframe, but once again they expect to get it out before the year ends. The benchmark tool will be available at a variety of price-points depending on usage level (consumer or business) as well as the usual free version, made possible through sponsorship arrangements with the likes of Antec and other hardware manufacturers.

For more info, check out the official fact sheet here and/or keep up with the latest 3DMark 11 news on the official Facebook page here. In the meantime, check out the new High Temple tech demo trailer below.